Mace on the Fire

By  |  Friday, September 30, 2011 at 3:17 am

Michael Mace of Mobile Opportunity blogged some of the smartest thoughts I’ve seen on Amazon’s announcement of the Kindle Fire and related products and services this week. One worthwhile nugget, of many:

I may be indulging in wishful thinking, but there’s a possibility that ten years from now we’ll look back on Silk as the single most important thing in today’s announcement.

 
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  1. David Hamilton Says:
    September 30th, 2011 at 5:23 am

    Entirely agree that Silk has the potential to change the game.

    The big question is: what does offloading processing activities to the cloud actually buy. The ability to use lower-powered CPUs and get longer battery life.

    5 years ago, that would have been a huge win. However, with CPUs becoming more and more power efficient, and batteries becoming better and better, the space that Amazon is aiming for seems to be closing.

    Or am I missing something?

  2. SamF Says:
    September 30th, 2011 at 6:00 am

    Your not missing anything and I don't see the big deal myself.

    First, this isn't new at all. Palm and Opera have both already done the same thing long before.

    Second, modern browsers (even mobile webkit on iOS & Android) and modern web servers already do alot of this optimization. Contrary to what the video suggested, browsers don't open 100 connections and request items one at a time; they open one or two connections and stream all the assets over it. Servers and proxies cache use compression aggressively and CDNs distribute the load. CSS permits media-specific queries so that appropriately sized graphics are downloaded.

    Third, this breaks SSL.

    Forth, especially on mobile, direct browser use is down. More people access the web via dedicated apps which often include embedded web clients (unless they intend to open silk up as a transparent replacement across the OS).

    Fifth, how does this not break rich web apps? Will the next rev of a site like Facebook or Gmail with extensive scripting work well?

    It's interesting, but I have to wonder why they bothered. Then again, maybe I'm not really getting it, yet.

  3. Pekka Says:
    September 30th, 2011 at 11:14 am

    Agree fully. Kudos also to SamF. Incidentally Cringely has largely the same take on the matter: Been there, done that, nothing new.

    Good marketing stunt for Bezos & co. though. Although all these nice catchy names were probably aimed at fooling consumers, even some should-know-better -pundits bought it.

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